California Thinks Jimmy Fallon Is An Enemy Of The State And 7 More Things About The Late Night Wars

Jimmy Fallon will kick off his (hopefully long) tenure as host of The Tonight Show on Monday, and this time around, the late night “wars” can be best described as friendly, but competitive. What’s not so friendly is a piece that Time magazine is running this week calling Jimmy Fallon an enemy of the state of California, a man with whom they should declare war. Why? Because Fallon has moved The Tonight Show from Burbank California to New York City, robbing “California of its biggest stage for statewide communication.”

This was personal—Leno and his wife are reliable supporters of local charities—but also part of the show. Presidents and other national politicians, on their frequent California fundraising trips, routinely ignored local journalists and rarely held town halls with citizens. But they sat down with Leno, who was often the only Californian who got to question these powerful visitors in a public forum.

He consistently put California newsmakers on the air, and got them to say things that were picked up by other media. Leno’s regular bit, “Jaywalking,” in which he asked people on our streets basic questions about government, was a devastating critique of the state of civics education in California. It also raised the question, still unanswered, of why we trust these citizens to provide final verdicts, via ballot measures, on so many complicated questions.

Somehow, I think that California will survive.

Here’s some other interesting tidbits about the late-night “wars.”

1. Over on MTV, someone who saw a test run of Fallon’s The Tonight Show spills on the details, of which there are few. What’s changed? The set, which is made largely of wood now. What hasn’t changed? Most everything else. Expect the same Fallon show, simply on a bigger, more wooden set.

4. The other shows aren’t going down without offering up some competition. Kimmel is offering as guests Bill O’Reilly, Matthew McConaughey, the cast of Duck Dynasty and Kit Harington. Letterman is going with Donald Trump, Pauley Perrette (NCIS), Olympic gold medalist Sage Kotsenburg, Lupita Nyong’o, Keri Russell, and on Monday night he has Kevin Spacey, Amber Heard and a top ten list presented by the cast of How I Met Your Mother. (THR)

5. Meanwhile, last week, The Tonight Show had its best ratings since 1993 (the week Cheers went off the air), while Fallon’s last week on Late Night had its best overall ratings week ever for Fallon, and the best week on Late Night since Johnny Carson’s last week on The Tonight Show.

6. In a very lengthy piece by longtime late-night writer Bill Carter in The New York Times, Fallon confessed that he believes his biggest competition is not Letterman, but Kimmel. “It’s a friendly rivalry, it really is,” Fallon said. “I needed someone to compete against me, to make me want to be sharper. Jimmy makes me want to be better.”

7. Finally, Hollyscoop dug up some old photos of Jimmy Fallon from back when he used to model for Calvin Klein, and they are hilarious.

“4. The other shows aren’t going down without offering up some competition. Kimmel is offering as guests Bill O’Reilly, Matthew McConaughey, the cast of Duck Dynasty and Kit Harington. Letterman is going with Donald Trump, Pauley Perrette (NCIS), Olympic gold medalist Sage Kotsenburg, Lupita Nyong’o, Keri Russell, and on Monday night he has Kevin Spacey, Amber Heard and a top ten list presented by the cast of How I Met Your Mother”

So other talk shows will continue to have guests there to plug projects and products? So basically it’s business as usual.

The Tonight Show isn’t The Tonight Show if you move it out of Southern California. Conan understood that and uprooted his whole life and those of his staff to preserve the integrity of the show, only to be stabbed in the back. You just can’t get the same guests and do the same bits in New York.

I have no issue with Fallon other than him insisting the show move to New York. I hope he does well as I always liked him on SNL and what little I’ve seen of his Late Night run I enjoyed. I think he fits the role and at least we are rid of the cancer that was Leno but the Tonight Show ain’t New York.

As mentioned the Tonight Show was originally a New York show. But besides that, your point about guests has been moot for years. Cross-continental flights aren’t that big of a deal, and celebrities often fly LA to New York and back again within a day. It’s not even unheard of for celebs to come in from the UK for interviews.

It might be a little harder for him to land LA-based guests, sure, but the other side of it is that not everyone is LA based anymore. There are probably almost as many productions for shows and movies in New York, many of them within the same building as Fallon. The guests won’t even have to put a coat on to do his show. Lots more actors are doing Broadway now too than they were in the 90s. And all of this is excluding the burgeoning filming scenes in the Southeast, Canada and overseas, where many movies and networks take advantage of tax breaks. Hollywood is most certainly not restricted to LA anymore.

On top of that I think it actually kind of restores a balance. Of the 11PM shows, Kimmel and Conan are in LA with I guess Arsenio, Fallon, Letterman, Stewart and Colbert are in New York, and the latter two don’t have as many actors on anyway.

Further to the point from Time of Jay’s tonight show being some sort of “voice” for California, the show is a national, even international brand now and despite its size, I don’t think as many people in the US identify with Los Angeles as people there like to think. They most certainly do to a bigger extent with New York, which is much more comparable to other metropolis across the world. And all of the New York hosts have done a good job of expressing that voice. Stewart had the mayor on the other day, Letterman often has politicians on and not just from New York. NYC is also closer to D.C. for what that’s worth.

And as much as I love Conan, his two biggest mistakes were him changing his comedy style for 11:35, which he still hasn’t recovered from, and moving the show to LA. The latter of which isn’t as bad now on his show,but back then he was very much a NYC guy, and if NBC wasn’t going to give him the time to change, then he shot himself in the foot by moving the show.

The biggest factor in all of this is Lorne Michaels though. If Fallon moves the show then he loses Lorne like Conan did. If he loses Lorne he doesn’t have him backing him up, and right now Lorne Michaels is pretty much NBC’s oldest and most powerful employee. He controls late night entirely and with him backing Fallon, that pretty much guarantees that all these people predicting Fallon will be out in a year are full of shit. Michaels, Fallon, and NBC are all very much defined by NYC, and it would have been disingenuous of him to move the show to LA after being a New York performer his entire life. Now, if the show had never been in New York, then I might be inclined to agree with you. But it originally was, and that means Fallon is bringing the show back to its roots while modernizing it after 20 years of the same shit from Leno, who essentially tarnished the show’s legacy twice, and that’s really cool.